


Jeeves and the Extended Gazelle Conundrum

by williamTspears



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 15:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10311665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/williamTspears/pseuds/williamTspears
Summary: "There has, I dare say, always been a particular fashion of Mr Wooster's which I have not been able to combat, one which I had thought myself immune to as he had made no motions of enacting it towards myself initially."-A ficlet and a double drabble, from Jeeves and Bertie's respective perspectives. Both on the subject of nicknames and endearments.





	1. Unintended Intimacy

There has, I dare say, always been a particular fashion of Mr Wooster's which I have not been able to combat. I do not speak of his poor sartorial choices, as this is something I have come to handle with ease over the years, but of a habit peculiar to his being, one which I had thought myself immune to as he had made no motions of enacting it towards myself initially.   
  
However, this assumption proved wrong. The only result of my having held such sense of security would be that I allowed myself to be caught unawares, and did not exactly realise what had occurred until it was rather too late to rescind my position of acceptance. Surely, it would have been simple to gently chide Mr Wooster and remind him of our places, but I did not find myself wholly willing to do so by the point at which I realised the habit was indeed a habit, and thus beginning to stick.   
  
There had been times, some years before this issue began and some years more before the current date, when Mr Wooster elected to refer to me as one item or another in metaphor or simile. A nanny at one point; a gazelle at another. He asked me each time if I minded his calling me so, and I told him no, I had no such objections to harmless allusions, although not in so many words.   
  
The crux of the issue was that my employer found it amusing to, at times, refer back to these incidents. He is a man of distinct speech patterns, highly prone to using such informal terms of address as 'my old fellow' or 'my dear chap', and it was in the tone of these wholly platonic endearments that he began to gently rib, to use a casual expression. I did not mind in the least as I had no reason to do such, at least at the time. So it came to begin, one evening alone in the flat, what I have personally come to think of as The Extended Gazelle Conundrum.   
  
His mood had been altogether cheerful and clear that day, having lunched out at a goodly hour and dined at home in the evening. At the conclusion of dinner he had been speaking of his activities during lunch and recounting the various problems of his drones associates as he sat on the lounge with a glass of whisky and soda, a lissom hand moving to unsettle his carefully tamed curls. I admit, rather ashamedly, that this had occupied my attention for a moment, not simply because he had placed himself in a state of slight disarray and ruined his pristine gentlemanly image.   
  
Mr Wooster is not particularly clever - a trait which I do not desire of him -, and he has a tendency to prattle. Most would call it blithering and find it uniquely exasperating, but I am inclined to think of it as charming in its own way. Suffice to say it had blended together as a sort of background noise during that moment of hand and hair related distraction on my part. When I focused once more on his speech, it was to be faced with the following phrase, said with a modicum of cheek and a glimmer of impishness lurking in those large blue eyes of his:   
  
'-eh, what? My dear gazelle.'   
  
Unable to say anything more without putting my own dignity at some jeopardy to admit I had not caught the first half of the statement about whomever it might have been having had a trifle with whatever it might have been, I replied thus:   
  
'Indeed, sir.'   
  
To which he snorted in amusement and returned to his tale. I was able to discern what I had agreed to from his following statements, but it was nothing of particular import and I will not recount the matter here. It was foolish of me to have not dwelt on the sobriquet, I admit, to have allowed him to continue unchecked, but he had called me such before and it was nothing more than a reference to our previous adventures. Or so I was to believe.   
  
It was a surprise to me to realise, when Mr Wooster had returned to my company from a night of revels exceedingly inebriated, that this term of endearment had become a habit. Draping an arm around my shoulder for balance, he had given me his thanks, punctuating his statement with the now increasingly present 'my dear gazelle'. But it contained nothing of the platonic frivolity which it had on all previous instances, and instead contained a rather suggestive element, if I had understood his tone correctly. The 'dear' had also been dropped, to the effect that he had directly referred to me as his gazelle, in much the same manner as one might say 'my darling'. I did not betray my small revelation, as I have always held myself to a certain standard of tact and indiscretion, and the matter was not returned to. The realisation I speak of involved not only the evidence that the term had now become more of a nickname than it had been originally been, but that by referring to me as his dear gazelle or simply his gazelle... Mr Wooster's words could be taken as a loving pet name, not of the platonic variety.   
  
A flirtation, so to speak, and I sincerely doubted that the man realised this, as he continued to refer to me as such from that point on. I had known for some time that my employer was not interested in the fairer sex, and that he had not realised this himself. It may sound presumptuous of me to say as much but I assure you my judgement was sound. Mr Wooster spent much of his romantic abilities, sporadic and unreliable as they might have been, on women whom he would lose interest in with almost alarming immediacy. He liked the  _ idea _ of these ladies, not the ladies themselves, and the rest is simply the psychology of the individual as I am sure you understand.   
  
It was uncertain to me whether he held an interest in the opposing direction and was unaware or repressive of such, or if he held no definite interest at all, but in either case the moniker with which he dubbed me could not have been intended to sound the way it did, which was if I were his affianced sweetheart. Regardless, in either case I had no interest in stopping the matter. One chooses their battles wisely, and does not seek to needlessly disrupt that which brings them comfort. The term of address and the double meaning to which it could allude indeed brought me comfort.   
  
Thus I have allowed the continued use of this sobriquet, and allowed my employer equal use of both my family name and it since the revelation of this fact. I am unsure of my stance towards it in some manner, as it more often than not has the effect of placing me on equal recognition with his peers, a level of informality highly unsuited to one such as myself. That is to say, it has the effect of identifying me as his friend rather than valet, and I only hope that the habit has not extended beyond the private conversations to which it seems confined as far as I am able to discern. It would be most unseemly. At best, my surname may be mistaken for Gazelle. At worst, questions of the propriety of our working relationship may be raised. It is for these reasons that I consider it to have been a mistake in some regards, yet...   
  
I myself am terribly fond of him, and I hold no intentions of betraying such to his person. I merely take what I may have appropriate to my position as his employee, even if this requires my doing that which would raise the eyebrows of my peers at the Junior Ganymede club by allowing him such intimacy in our personal communications.

I  _ am _ fond of Mr Wooster.


	2. Supreme Subtlety

We Woosters are a subtle sort, clever with our words, and the fact is rather a point of pride to self. In fact, with this fact, as a matter of fact, I have been able to start a sort of habit with Jeeves - my man, you know - which he accepts well enough because I don't think he quite knows what I'm really getting at.

It's a rather clever plot, which took a dashed lot of building up to for it to work. You see, I have managed to give my man a pet name. My  _ gazelle _ , don't you know.

Because it's not as if I can very well go ahead and call him 'my darling'. That would give the whole game away at once, and I can't have him knowing how much he's gone and grown on me as both a friend and confidant. No, rather, I'm letting it go as an unsuspecting sort of nickname, one which I doubt even he would realise, with that fine fish-fed brain, doesn't always sound so much in the way of basic chumminess as it does in the way of a  _ real _ endearment. We Woosters are quite a subtle sort after all, what?

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to Hugh for being my beta and supplying half the idea this is based on ♡
> 
> \--
> 
> This actually stemmed from the thought of what Jeeves' nickname might be if he had been Bertie's old friend rather than valet, and not Reggie, all the ideas (most just cracky jokes) being, in this order: 'Jeevy', 'Skeevy Jeevy', 'Schemer', 'Pet', 'Schet', 'Peemer', 'Peeves', 'Peevesy Jeevesy', 'Steve', '(insert that one song by The Ting Tings)', 'Gazelle', 'Ellie', and finally, 'Gayzelle'.
> 
> We of course stuck to Gazelle, being that it actually has a canon root. And then this happened, which has nothing to do with them having known each other previously.


End file.
